Gandhi With a Guinness (Mark Steyn whacks the IRA for the second time)

marksteyn.com (The Irish Times) ^ | Monday March 14, 2005 | Mark Steyn

[NZerFromHK]

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GANDHI WITH A GUINNESS

I took a second whack at the IRA in this column for The Irish Times on Monday March 14th. If it's hard to see quite what the British Government had to gain by accommodating Sinn Fein, it should have been obvious that the Irish Government had even more to lose by it:

When Mr Bush declared his “war on terror” after September 11th, most of us assumed it was a euphemism. As the eminent British historian Corelli Barnett endeavoured to explain, “It is misleading to talk of a ‘war on terrorism’… You cannot in logic wage war against a phenomenon, only against a specific enemy.”

But it seems the President begs to differ. His predecessor was a great performer, and as such he was happy to go along with the performances of others – in this instance, the charade that Gerry Adams had somehow transformed himself into a man of peace, a Gandhi with a Guinness. Alas, the current occupant of the Oval Office is not a performer and thus has less of an appetite for play-acting, particularly when it’s as unconvincing as Sinn Fein’s: Mr Bush is who he is, he’s a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kinda guy. And when he sees Adams, he gets him – which is more than can be said for the British and Irish governments.

But even at the height of self-delusion about the "peace process", America’s role was mostly confined to some platitudinous gladhanding by Bill Clinton – lots of maudlin speeches about how “I truly believe that two sides riven by bitterness and mistrust can learn to co-exist on a small island. Look at me and Hillary on our post-Monica vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.” (I quote from memory.)

It wasn’t the Yanks who thought Martin McGuinness had such unique talents to bring to the job of Ulster's “Education Minister” – though he and his pals have certainly done a grand job educating the citizenry in West Belfast: keep your head down, mind your own business, don’t step out of line, nobody saw nuttin’. My British readers’ anger is misdirected: it’s their own government that’s spent ten years cynically indulging IRA thuggery as nothing more than a little “internal housekeeping”. It’s George W Bush who’s decided enough is enough.

Even without the IRA’s ties to Columbia’s FARC and the PLO, American political reality requires Gerry Adams be persona non grata. Even if one accepts the view that Ulster Nationalists are an artificially created minority trapped in a gerrymandered state, so what? The same could be said of Iraqi Kurds, whose gerrymandered border dates from the same year and the same source – London, 1922. The point is the Bush Administration is admirably clear-sighted about the world’s tinpot thugs. They concluded, rightly, that Yasser Arafat was a waste of time: the Nobel Peace Prize winner did more for peace in the Middle East by dying than he’d done in the previous 40 years. And right now the Sinn Fein/IRA leadership is looking a lot like the PLO’s – men who use the lavish patronage of European political leaders as a useful cover for lining their own pockets and eliminating their enemies.

The only difference is that in this case the European leaders concerned – in London and Dublin – are not monkeying with the lives of faraway people of whom they know little but with their own countries. And, given that Sinn Fein’s conversion to a shadow kleptocracy that’s a cross between Hezzbollah and the Russian Mafia poses a far greater long-term threat to the fundamental identity of the Irish Republic than of the United Kingdom, Dublin’s behaviour has been even more foolish.

The people of Northern Ireland, quite reasonably enough, enjoy being able to go to the pub without having it blown up mid-pint. But peace is more than merely the absence of bombs. And in the past decade, under cover of the “peace process”, Sinn Fein has, as Kevin Myers puts it, utterly transformed Ireland’s political map - to a degree they could never have accomplished with mere bombs. Some peace process. It is not Bush’s job to be tougher on Sinn Fein than Blair or Ahern. But at least in years to come, if they’re asking “Who lost Ireland?”, we’ll know who not to blame.

[slane]

the current occupant of the Oval Office is not a performer and thus has less of an appetite for play-acting

Bush is humiliating Brownie and having the McCartney sisters in the White House is the icing on the cake. This will be a St. Patrick's Day to remember!

[Dr.Deth]

OTOH, if we use the same logic employed by some FReepers, we would have to conclude that the proper approach would be to wipe out all of the Irish Catholics....

"Cold is God's way of telling us to burn more Catholics!"